


dragged my guts a block

by Trojie



Category: Bandom, Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance
Genre: Communication Failure, Hopeful Ending, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Musicians, Pete Wentz Is Sad, Post-Apocalypse, Van Days
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-01
Updated: 2018-12-01
Packaged: 2019-09-05 03:31:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16802782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trojie/pseuds/Trojie
Summary: You can't check out of the end of the world, but Pete's giving it a damn good try.





	dragged my guts a block

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place in an AU where society suffered its fatal collapse during the FOB hiatus (correlation does not imply causation) and MCR haven't made Danger Days (yet), but everyone's still in their bands. I'm fully aware that this makes NO DAMN SENSE but it's fun.
> 
> It's van days postapocafic, basically.
> 
> The amazing glowbugsgleam made art to go with this piece which can be found on Tumblr here. Please, everyone go look at it and give her all the love <333

Pete's not sure what year it is any more, or where he is, although the sand underfoot and the cold prickle in the air now the sun's going down should probably count as clues. Whatever, though, right? It's not like state lines mean that much these days, and it's not like he cares, either, when he's semi-drunk on some shit he's pretty sure someone made in an old rubber boot. 

There are plenty of things Pete doesn't like about it here (sand, heat, cold, lack of places to take a piss without someone watching), but he does like that this … whateverthefuck Burning Man shit they drove into ... is crowded. More people makes it easier to get something to take the edge off. 

There's a lot of edges on Pete that need blunting and no fucking pharmacies any more. He does the best he can with the … resources he has at his disposal. Carefully. It's a Scylla and Charybdis kind of a problem. Rock and a hard place. Frying pan and fire. Whatever. If metaphor were a solution Pete's problems would have been solved a million years and three albums ago, but it’s not, and they really haven’t.

He skirts a bonfire that's only just not a natural disaster, one eye half on the semi-naked drum circle thing that seems to be happening a little bit away, and runs straight into a collarbone and a pair of arms that catch him, take him in in a way that's a thousand years old and instantly familiar.

'Mikey?' he says, kinda shocked, and Mikey, who he hasn't seen in … however long it's been, who he hasn't even _heard from_ since the satellites all went down and phones became paperweights, grins at him in that Mikeyway style that makes it seem like he has to think about each muscle movement involved individually. 

'Hey Pete.'

Pete blinks at him. His hair's long now, at least along the top - it's buzzed at the sides or it was maybe a month ago, if Pete's any judge, and it's bleached to hell and regrowing at the roots. Punk, but fuzzy at the edges.

At some point Pete's gonna have to stop staring at him, but. Well. He knew Mikey hadn’t _died_ \- My Chem have been caught up in this whole mess exactly the way Pete and his boys were, but. He's … there's been a niggle in his head about Mikey for a while. He wouldn't be the first person to have gone radio silence and never surfaced near Pete again, since the shit hit the fan. But here he is in Pete's arms again. Or Pete’s in his, in point of fact -

'You … gonna let go of me?' Mikey asks after a second. 

'No,' says Pete, putting his arm around Mikey's waist and tugging him along. 'Why would I do that?'

He's being a shit and he knows it and he expects Mikey to laugh and push him away, but Mikey hooks his arm around Pete's neck and lets himself be dragged around, smiling his secret little smile. He leans closer in now than Pete remembers him doing before, probably because his glasses aren't there any more to poke Pete in the temples, but everything else is the same, the warmth of that lean body against Pete's, the porcelain-delicate feeling between them of everything being so beautiful Pete just knows he'll break it. 

From the fucking start, Pete never knew what to do with the way they rubbed against each other and sparks flashed in the space between them, and he fucking - he tried, okay? They both tried. And it didn't work out. The rest is history and anyone who wants to make something of it can argue with Pete's fucking gold records, okay?

Plenty of things in Pete's life never worked out. Those gold records? All those words he wrote? They didn't stop the band ending. Again - whatever. He's just so fucking glad to see Mikey again. He drags him over to the little tent he made earlier, stretched out of a dirty old tarp over some mismatched poles. He put it together before the sun went down, just out of reach of the fire. Warm, but with a good view - of the people, and the stars.

They people-watch, Pete snorts derisively at the drum-circle, which is worth watching now that he's got someone to watch it with, someone who'll giggle in his ear when he says mean things under his breath. It's like ... however many years never happened, it's fucking ... waterparks all over again, y'know? Except the sand underfoot has never seen chlorine or dog shit, and the sky overhead is pure dark and stars prickle it, there's no poison glow of city lights to fence them in. 

Only Mikey's feet are still under Pete's tarp. He's stretched himself out belly-down, playing with a stick, poking the dying remains of the little fire that they've colonised. Pete's folded up, tucked in on himself, sitting very close. There's a late-night swingset feel to the air between them, and Pete wants to have secrets to share with Mikey but there isn't much he hasn't already poured out into the void, there's not that much left of Pete these days to keep under wraps. As for Mikey - well. Mikey's just tired.

'I dunno, it has its moments,' says Pete, trying to ease the mood, trying to ignore the licking flames around Mikey's stick, the hunger of the fire. 'You don't get the whole, like, on-tour vibe off this shit?'

'That's what I'm saying, man. It's like being on the road forever. Like. Sometimes the best part of being on tour was that you knew it was going to end. You knew you'd run out of venues sooner or later. This? It fucking sucks. I'm exhausted.' The shadowed side of Mikey's face is grey and his eyes are deep and the corner of his mouth twists down, an old look on him, a look Pete was used to seeing in the photos from after that summer. 'I just wanna be able to go home.' Mikey says. 'I want summer to be over.'

Pete lies down and pulls him close - closer - without even thinking until after he's done it. Pete clings like he's always clung to the past.

'There's nowhere left to go,' says Mikey into Pete's chest. 

'The only way out is through,' is all Pete's got to give him, the only thing that springs to mind and it isn't particularly comforting, but it's ... it's something.

'There _is_ no way out,' says Mikey. 'Don't kid yourself, Wentz. End of the world, remember?'

'See, this is what I always liked so much about you My Chem boys, your relentless cheer in the face of adversity,' says Pete, trying to make a joke about it, to excuse the fact that Mikey's right.

'Fuck you,' says Mikey. 

'Dude, you guys literally wrote a song called 'Dead', I don't know what you want from me.'

Mikey rolls his eyes and hums _Hallelujah_ at him and christ, Pete had forgotten what a little shit he could be. He digs his fingers into Mikey's side, tickles him til he shuts up and drops his stick, giggling his dumb little giggle as sparks fly into the air. 

By the time they've both stopped moving, the drum circle is mostly fully naked and not so much bothered with drumming any more, but all the other movement around the ramshackle camp has stopped. The fires are burned to hot silver embers, and the generators running the sound system are powered down. It's quiet, except for human noises. Mikey's half in Pete's lap. 

'I should go find the guys,' says Mikey eventually, pulling himself to his feet. 'They're probably already freaking out.' Pete lets Mikey yank him to a standing position too, knowing he should do the same. The sky overhead is starting to get sickly with dawn colours, and Pete's head is just a tiny bit sore. He starts to cast around, folding up his tarp and trying to remember where he and Joe parked the van last night.

He's so distracted by that that he doesn't think anything of it when Mikey's face is suddenly so close to his, closer than it has been all night. 'We should do this again sometime,' says Mikey, and he brushes a kiss against Pete's mouth careless and warm, and turns on his heel.

He's gone before Pete can do anything but stand there with his fingers on his lips.

Pete and his boys are back on the road two hours later. Pete and Mikey don't see each other again for a while. 

***

My Chem stay in the desert. Pete hears something about rerouting the water supply, something environmentalist and, naturally, visually striking. Digital's dead but there's a surprisingly large amount of that instax polaroid-style film around still, and Pete gets handed a pic one day of Gerard with a fucking pipe wrench in one hand and a flag in the other, the melodramatic son of a bitch. You can make out Mikey, Frank and Ray in the background, looking uncomfortable and determined. Mikey's eyes are huge in his too-thin face, they're not more than a pair of blurry dark shapes, and the fuzzy, out of focus, out of depth shot turns him into a skeleton caricature of himself.

His mouth is a grim line, though, even in a shot this bad Pete can make it out. He doesn't wonder why it's even something he notices. He knows why.

Pete and the others go north, or rather, their crew go north, hitting a chain of factory farms, puppy mills, cosmetics testing places over the course of about two weeks. They make it to what's left of Reno with a lot less spray paint and a lot more dogs in the convoy. 

Thing is, see, when the corporations liquidated and bailed, turned their tails, went underground, they left shit behind. Lots of times, they left it behind alive. 

Some people genuinely don't care. Lots of people do care but fuck, they gotta survive, they gotta look after their own. They hunkered down. Some places, rural places, you wouldn't even know the planet had fucking crashed. They're still making their own butter and churning their own hay or whatever it is you do in the country. 

But some people didn't have anywhere to hunker down. And there's still a lot of fighting to be done, in so many fucking ways. There were so many marches, all the way up to the point where there was nothing to march against, and after … after everything that went down … well, some of the marchers just kept on walking, fire in their bellies and steelcaps on their feet.

Bands are like mascots or something - most of the cells seem to pick one up, or nucleate around them maybe is a better case - the My Chem kids definitely closed ranks around their idols, and Pete guesses you could say Fall Out Boy's fans did the same, only. 

Only they weren't Fall Out Boy at the time. They were The Damned Things, and Patrick Stump who'd gone to see them play that … well, 'fateful night' is about the only decent phrase, and. And Pete hadn't even been there.

A week later, still roiling in the chaos of the aftermath, Andy and Joe and Patrick, in a shitbox of a van with Andy's drum set in the back of it next to Joe's amp and Tele, pulled up outside Pete's house in what was left of LA. They'd lost everything except each other, and even with all the shit (and fuck knows, it was a lot of shit), they came back for Pete. 

Pete hadn't exactly moved. He'd let his world fall away around him, just watching the sky.

It was just gonna be for a little while, camping in the van like old times, til they could figure out what the fuck was going on, but. Things happen in front of you, y'know? And you gotta either do something or … or not do it, turn a blind eye, and God knows none of the four of them have ever been good at that. Before Pete really knew what was happening there was a suburban soccer-mom people-carrier riding along beside them full of college kids, then a beat up old Toyota Corolla driven by a purple-haired woman with her three dogs in the back, and … that was just the start. God knows why everyone else hangs around them. They're fucking musicians, they're not political leaders, but things keep happening, and they keep not turning that blind eye, for what good it does. 

So this is the Fall Out Boy reunion show, here at the beginning of the end of the world. Hell froze over, just for Pete.

At nights they play songs, a lot of the time. That's one thing Pete can do that he knows people appreciate. It's little and it's shallow, but at least people smile. Sometimes the guys can lose themselves in it enough that they smile, too. 

Pete tries to write words that mean something, if that's what everyone needs from him. He can provide anthems. He sure as shit can't provide anything else.

Well. He's handy with bolt-cutters. Sometimes he's good for a loudmouth distraction, while his kids (older than him, younger than him, growing out their puppy fat or their hair dye or their bad fashion choices or their optimism - they're all Pete's kids now) break into an abandoned building that's echoing with whimpers and snarls.

You hear about the things other wandering convoys have done sometimes, by word of mouth or those shitty fuzzy photos from cheap 'retro' film cameras. Pete wonders if polaroids of things like this - Andy with a hoodie wrapped around his arm breaking a lab window; Joe handing wriggling, half-starved puppies to Patrick through a tear in a chainlink fence - ever make it out, make it as far as MCR and their enviro-hippie crusade.

If they do, he wonders if they're like the photos from before - 90% Pete even though he was never actually doing anything worth being photographed, while the other three got on with shit around him.

***

Patrick still gets Pete's scribbled lyrics, so Patrick gets a look at what's in Pete's head maybe sooner than Pete ever really intends him to.

It's still weird, giving him notebooks again. But it's worth it, like ripping off a bandaid, every time.

'You always want things to mean more than they have to,' Patrick says to him one day. Pete's driving, so he can't run away. Patrick's riding shotgun. He smells of gasoline because he drew the worst, shortest, shittiest straw and was on siphoning duty this morning. It gets down your shirt no matter what you do, even a few drops are enough to perfume the air around you. Pete's nose wrinkles - he doesn't know how Patrick isn't nauseous over it. But he doesn't seem to be - he's thumbing through Pete's notebook, casual. 'Not everything has to be earth-shatteringly important, Pete.' 

'It's the end of the world, says Pete, keeping his hands on the wheel. 'Either everything's important or nothing is.'

Patrick sighs. In the middle-back seat, Andy's asleep on Joe's shoulder and Joe's reading a battered old mystery novel and ignoring the front-seat melodrama with an ease borne of years of practice. Pete envies Joe sometimes. A lot of - no, most. Most of the time. 

'Isn't Mikey important?' Patrick asks softly. 

Pete glances down at Patrick's lap and realises there's a polaroid in the gutter of the notebook, left as a bookmark where he left off writing. He didn't even know it was in there, he thought he'd lost it, or given it away. 

The image is in his mind, he doesn't really need the proof.

He shrugs. The steering wheel cover is hot under his hands. 'Either everything's important, or nothing is,' he says again, and Patrick rolls his eyes. _Look pal,_ Pete wants to say. _If you had a problem with the melodrama you didn't have to come get me._ But they both know that.

'We're heading south again after this stop,' Patrick says, stuffing the notebook, with the polaroid sticking one corner out from between the pages, back into the glove compartment. 'Keep writing. We're gonna need it.'

'Any of that shit usable? Pete asks, bracing for a fight. The first few iterations of new material are always a fucking trial. 

'It's all usable. How do you think I knew Mikey was back in the picture?'

'What's that supposed to mean?'

Patrick shrugs, and tugs his hat down over his face like he's planning on napping. 'You do your best work when your head's up your own ass,' he says, and turns his head to mash his face into the door pillar. 

Pete grits his teeth and continues not taking his hands off the wheel.

***

The next time Pete sees Mikey face to face, it's somewhere in the woods and Pete's feet hurt and he just wants a fucking hug. They've danced around each other all day, weaving between trees like ghosts and having what passes for soundcheck now that they're down to one amp cab per guitar or bass, one generator per band, with diesel rationed like it's gold. Too busy to catch each other, but they can't quite avoid each other, either. Pete knows Patrick knows Pete knows Mikey's here. He keeps giving Pete sidelong looks. 

Pete's also seen Gerard lurking, which is one of his superpowers, somehow alongside being a massive spotlight hog.

Pete just keeps thinking about what a hug means that's different from a kiss. The words _that_ train of thought coughed up into the notebook made Patrick rolls his eyes behind his glasses and tell Pete he wasn't here to write _Mister Brightside_ 2.0.

My Chem get up first, and they play like they always play - like it might be the last time. They make Pete wanna kick a door down at the same time as they make him wanna fucking cry, and looking at the crowd, he's pretty sure he's not the only one. Old songs are a lot of what makes up the little comfort anyone has anymore. People yell requests, serious and not.

It says so fucking much, that people cry now when someone plays _Wonderwall_ , but then again maybe it's just how Toro plays it, or the way Gerard inflects _because maybe, you're gonna be the one that saves me-_ that stops it being a joke.

This meetup's cold and sad-tinged. It's hard to be punk-rock in winter, it sucks being hardcore when you sleep on frozen ground. Tonight they all put their arms around each other for _Not Okay_ and hold the fuck on as the pit surges and heaves. They wanna be told they can keep fighting even when things get hard. Pete gets that.

Pete throws himself into it when it's Fall Out Boy's turn in the trampled-flat clearing. He has to fight his own kind of fight, to get the bassline heard over the hum of the genny that shares his usual octaves. They play _Sugar_ and Patrick tells the crowd they're going down swinging, and all Pete can feel about it is that, well, the first half feels true. 

They play their set - hits and misses, covers and B sides and new shit. The mood gets heavy (heavier) and Andy yells out a suggestion for Cannibal Corpse (' _Fucked with a knife_!' he bellows too loud into the air) and Patrick, who can't sing like that, throws a pick at him. Joe starts playing _Smoke on the Water_ and they all pick it up.

Pete feels empty when they're done, everything he had poured out in harmonics- amplitudes and wavelengths - or panted against Patrick's shoulder. There's nothing left for him. 

A shape flits towards him, narrow movement in the narrow gaps between trees, and Mikey's psychic or some shit because he hugs Pete as soon as they're within hugging range. He nuzzles his face into Pete's cheek, stubble rasping. He holds on so tight it's like he thinks they're going to be pulled apart, disarticulated like bones from a carcass.

Pete aches on his insides almost more than he aches on his outsides, and there are words in his notebook he deliberately wrote so sloppy that Patrick couldn't make them out. He can't just not write things down, not after all this time, but there are some things he doesn't want to give Patrick as ammunition, either to fire out into the world or back at Pete. So maybe he turns his face into Mikey's. Maybe. Maybe he does that. Maybe he's tired and sore and he gravitates to touch like a bean-plant's tendrils. Thigmotropism in its most technical sense, an automatic response; he turns his face into Mikey's and maybe their mouths catch at each other. 

Maybe Pete makes the world's worst decisions and maybe Mikey has a sweet mouth that Pete has had a hard time forgetting even if he could never bring himself to admit he was looking at it. 

Mouths are just mouths, anyway, like, who cares? Kissing doesn't mean anything, Pete thinks, as Mikey's lips part under his and they breathe together, stubble and skin and softness. It's only a kiss. 

It's just a mouth. Pete tells himself that with Mikey up against him. Pete tells himself that with Mikey on his knees. It's just a mouth.

Mikey swallows him so eagerly, so warm in the dark and the cold of the winter forest that Pete forgets to shiver. Pete buries his hands in Mikey's hair, comes in that soft mouth, in the dark, and it shouldn't matter.

When he pulls Mikey back to his feet and gets his pants open, it's because a hand is just a hand, and a dick is just a dick and Pete's got a dick of his own so why would it be weird for him to have a hand on a dick? This hand has been on a dick before. Not Mikey's, not anyone's but Pete's, but it's not … it's nothing that means anything has to change. 

He wipes his hand off on Mikey's jeans and zips them both back up again, resets the scene back to the starting marks. Mikey's so fucking gentle all over Pete's side, draped like a sheet covering Pete's modesty, when the yelling starts some distance away. 

Revolutionary politics sometimes ends in fires, is the thing. They get smoked out of that forest. 

Fall Out Boy cause a screaming riot on the outskirts of some fucking town, the remnants of a town anyway, that he doesn’t even know the name of three days later and someone chops down a flagpole, and then they're full on running. The diesel all goes to keeping the convoy moving, the genny in the trailer with the amps runs on empty for a while. Patrick plays an old acoustic guitar with a warped fretboard that won't hold its tuning in the constantly changing climates they pass through, and he fights it hard every step of the way but he won't stop playing.

The smell of come fades out of Pete's jeans long before he gets a chance to actually wash them, but the smell of petrol stays on Patrick's shirts, and it burns Pete's sinuses, when Pete has to be touching him or fly to pieces.

The kids amoeba'd around My Chem blow up an oil derrick in Texas.

It's a busy time, full of acrid smoke. More photos reach Pete. Mikey looks like shit in most of them. Pete asks one of the girls who makes her living squirrelling up and down the country trading info and comms to take him a letter. 

It's not really a letter, it's a polaroid of one of the pages of his notebook, one of the scribbled ones. But he scrawls _i hope you can read this_ on the back of it. 

_xoxopw_ he adds on autopilot, signing it, and he comes so close to crossing that out in heavy black lines. So close. 

He's pretty sure Mikey won't be able to read his scribbles. Pete's good at words and he's good at running his mouth off, but he's shit at talking about things when they really matter. Maybe Mikey does figure out some of it, though, because the next time they see each other it's in an abandoned theatre and for once Pete and the boys get there in time to catch MCR warming up the crowd, and after they're done with that and the politics starts up again Pete finds himself dragged away by the neck. 

Mouths are mouths and hands are hands but Mikey's curve down around Pete's hips and cup his ass and no, no. Not that. That's ... that's something Pete can't pretend about. He doesn't have an analogue for that, he doesn't have a metaphor, a simile - that ... is what it is and what it isn't is something Pete does. 

'Fuckin' - Pete, _God_ -' Mikey growls, but Pete pulls him away and then pushes him into the wall, hard. 

They get each other off by friction that time. Mikey's mad and Pete's head is in a million places but they both want to get off more than they want to walk away. 

Afterwards there aren't any soft kisses for Pete, there's just Mikey's ass in fucking tight pants, leaving.

Pete maybe shouldn't look at it.

Pete maybe can't stop himself.

***

They're in this town maybe a week. Patrick steps in to drum for My Chem a couple of times. They haven't kept a drummer in ... well. A long time. It's a thing for them, they usually just find someone who can at least keep the beat, and make do. There's always someone around. And maybe it's a shame to see them play with drummers who run the spectrum all the way down to 'barely knows how to syncopate', when the drummers they recorded with … but. Well. It's a thing. Everyone's got a thing.

(It hasn't escaped Pete's notice that MCR never seem to go through the Midwest.)

Patrick puts fucking art and soul into it though when he plays for them, like he does with everything. Pete bursts with pride in him even as he's jealous and mean over seeing him with some other band. 

They trade off who plays first each night, like it's an old-school double headliner in a venue big enough to have a stage higher than the audience members' heads, even though it isn't, even though they play in whatever five shitty square feet they can cram into, even though both of them are just the openers for the business, the talking, the negotiations and planning and logistics that Pete can barely fathom. One night My Chem will 'open' for Fall Out Boy - the next night Pete and his boys will take the stage first and get people moving before Gerard and his kids take over. 

It always ends in stomping and bouncing and desperate mouths screaming lyrics that twist their meanings from the shallow personal shit Pete wrote them to be, whichever order they go on. He isn't sure if he's comfortable being part of the guts of a revolution when he doesn't know anything about how it works. If the head gets cut off this snake is Pete still gonna be keeping the body alive? For how long? And will he even notice?

Andy and Joe, and Patrick, they join in the main event. They get around tables. They slap their hands down on maps. 

Pete goes looking for something to help him sleep, but no-one will trade him anything for anything. In the end he tucks himself up against a speaker cab that smells of something unspeakable and has done ever since he and Joe went dumpster-diving for it in the remains of LA some amount of time ago, and tries to doze.

'No thanks, I choose life,' says Joe sardonically from the debate. Pete's position on the floor means that he can see a forest of legs, the dark space under the rickety table they're arguing around. Andy's feet are tapping. Patrick's legs, recognisable by his ruined Converse that Pete drew all over in Sharpie weeks ago, stretch out and he gently presses Andy's feet flat to the floor with his own.

 _Chill_ he's saying, doesn't take a lot to read that. 

Pete stares at the toes of their shoes touching, and wishes someone had taken him up on an offer.

***

Pete ties a knot in the bottom of an old t-shirt to turn it into a bag and goes out with Andy looking for anything they can find that's edible, and they come back with a half dozen grapefruit off a straggly tree, six label-less cans of something he hopes isn't dog food but will probably get desperate enough to eat even if it is, a package of Twinkies, and a couple of big flat-topped mushrooms Andy swears blind aren't poisonous. They don't have red caps with big white spots, which is about the limit of Pete's ability to tell if they're edible or not, so they'll do. 

They were also growing up through the cracks in the parking lot asphalt of the abandoned supermarket that most of the rest of the food was in. Pete hates when the world screams metaphors at him.

'One of these days we're gonna run out of the processed shit too, and then we'll be fucked,' says Pete, breaking a Twinkie in half and offering it to Andy, who waves him away. 

'You do realise this planet grows food, right?' Andy asks. 'Everything you need, all the nutrients and shit. It just takes a bit more work, that's all.'

'What if I can't live without Twinkies?' Pete asks. 

'What if you ate a vegetable for once in your life?'

'What if those are like, destroying death caps or whatever, and you kill me with fricassee?' Pete nods at the mushrooms, which Andy's carrying so Pete doesn't crush them with his cans of please-don't-be-dog-food.

'If you actually paid any attention to what was going on around you, you'd be able to tell the difference between 'dangerous' and 'delicious',' says Andy, rolling his eyes. 

Pete pokes his tongue out. 

***

Something's been decided, by the people who set the directions they go in. Pete's not sure what it is, only that hands were shaken and nods were exchanged and everyone's been smiling in that grim but satisfied way they do just before, e.g., Pete finds himself throwing his P-bass into the back of the van and yelling at Joe to _go, go, go, fucking put your foot down, man._ Pete just gets passed the word that they're gonna be moving out in the morning, that's usually all the warning he gets. 

He could probably be more engaged. He's vaguely aware that The Used pretty much _are_ spearheading whatever it is they're involved in, and My Chem at least appear to have some degree of influence over what their kids are doing, but Pete can't keep up with it all. He has a vague sense that he should care? Or that in the past he might have? The other guys do. But Pete's so fucking tired, and it's such hard work keeping his head straight these days, when pharmacies are few and far between and mostly ransacked, that he pretty much just goes along with whatever and worries about music, because at least he can control that part.

All he gets from the latest set of marching orders is that MCR won't be going with them. They're splitting up again. Smaller convoys travel faster. They're also on diesel rations again. Pete can't deny the logic, but he hates the quiet of the nights when they're on whatever anarchist mission his kids are hell-bent on this time, and they can't play. If they can't play, what good are they?

Mikey was right. It's exhausting, knowing there's no home waiting at the end of this tour. 

Pete's trailing along an echoing concrete corridor, vaguely aware that this might be the last night he actually gets to sleep somewhere that isn't the van for a while, when he gets yanked into a small dark space and molested til he can't fucking breathe. He's groaning in five seconds flat, he's leaking into his jeans in ten. 

Mikey's hand slips down the back of Pete's jeans again, and Pete whimpers. 

'Mikey,' he pants, pulling back, trying to get space between them with his head spinning. 'No.'

Mikey lets him move. It's too dark to see much, but that's good. Pete doesn't want to see Mikey's face. He doesn't want Mikey to look at him. 

'Okay,' says Mikey, like he's trying to understand. 'You just ... don't like it, or what?'

Pete latches onto the get-out-of-jail-free card he's just been handed. 'Yeah,' he says apologetically. 'Not into it. Sorry.'

It's not a lie. It's never been something he wanted to try, it's not - he doesn't want it. He's not into it. You can be not into a thing without having to go through the experience of having it. He's also not into base-jumping, or canyoning, or Settlers of Catan. 

Mikey eyes him like he can read the ticker-tape scroll of Pete's dumbass thoughts, then shrugs, and pulls Pete's hands back to his hips. 'Do me, then,' he says, like it's that simple, like that's the easy option, like that's an option at all. Like Pete would do that to him. 

Pete shudders a little, and his fingers tighten involuntarily, pushing under the hem of Mikey's shirt. Mikey tucks himself in tight. He's hard and distracting against Pete's hip, a counterpoint reminder that what this feels like and what this is are different things. 

'Been a long fucking apocalypse,' Mikey breathes in Pete's ear, still not letting go of Pete's hands, pressing them into his waist, dragging them around his hips, down to his ass, 'with not enough fucking.'

Pete, dizzy, intoxicated by closeness, doesn't know what to do. He - touching is one thing, kissing is another, but fucking is - Pete doesn't. Mikey _knows_ Pete doesn't. It's a bad idea, it's always been a bad, fucking terrible idea - 

He shudders into Mikey's space and says, 'No condoms. No lube. Mikes, I can't -'

There's a tense, terrifying moment of _what if he doesn't care, what if he wants me to do him raw, what if I - what if he walks away from me -_ Pete's clinging by his own volition now, Mikey's hands over the top of his and fingers slotted in between but Pete couldn't let go of Mikey if he tried, suddenly afraid of being alone again -

and then Mikey sighs

'Fine,' he says. 'If we're being sensible about this shit. But you can still fucking finger me, dude.'

Pete feels like a rat in a trap. Mikey's ass fits kind of perfectly in his hands, he rocks his dick in the crease of Pete's hip, and it's so fucking obvious what he wants. Pete ... is totally without a map here. Or rather, he has a detailed and extensive map but he's in the wrong country.

'Just,' he says softly, holding Mikey and pulling them together, 'can we just?'

It feels so fucking juvenile, but the truth of it is that this is what he wants, soft and sweet and gentle, just rubbing together through their jeans. And Mikey gives it to him, but afterwards he fists his hand in Pete's hair and forces their eyes to meet.

'No assplay, huh?' he says. 'That's still your thing, the whole above-the-belt shit?'

Pete can't look at him, even if he can't turn away - he just looks through, and hopes the dark will cover the fact that he's unfocused, hazy with orgasm and something that curls in his gut like worry. 

'I've got a dick whether you like it or not, Pete. Sorry if that's a, like, problem for you or whatever.'

'I don't -' Pete starts, but Mikey snorts, and lets him go. 

'And it won't matter how much you change this when you write it down, either,' he says, swiping his hand through his hair and clasping the back of his neck. Pete can't see his expression properly but he can read the way he stands, just like Mikey can almost certainly read him, awkward and untruthful in his pose. 'Use any pronouns you want, Pete, I can still read your fucking handwriting.'

And then Pete's alone in a closet, which is just a delightful fucking metaphor, isn't it.

***

'It's just a river, for fuck's sake, there's a bridge.' A bridge Pete must have crossed and crisscrossed a hundred, a thousand times. This is familiar terrain. This is his fucking stomping ground, or the gateway to it, and how dare someone cordon it off?

'Yeah,' says Joe slowly, as if Pete's being dumb. 'And the people who control that bridge don't want us to cross it unless we give them all our food.'

Pete rolls his eyes. 'It's the interstate. No-one owns it, jackass.'

'And I didn't say owns, I said controls,' Joe snipes back. 'Access is a resource, Pete.'

Pete can't deny Joe's right, it just fucking _irks_ him that someone put their bullshit little stake in the ground here, _here_ of all places. They're so close Pete would swear he could smell the fucking lake, and some assholes have tried to ringfence it? It makes him pissy, that's all.

'So we go around,' says Andy, rolling up his shorts even higher than they already are.

And that's how Pete Wentz ends up up to his balls in what used to be the Chicago River, pushing their piece of shit van that cut out halfway through the ford, in the dark. Mostly dark. The moon's about three-quarters tonight - just enough to silver the surface of the water where it breaks around them, to show up the dead stalks of the lights that would have lit the road, back when there was an electrical grid that still worked. 

He doesn't even recognise the first bullet for what it is until Andy cannons into his side and nearly drowns him in the process of getting him on the other side of the van, where Joe and Patrick are already huddled, if you can huddle in water. 

'Fuck, they've seen us,' Joe says worriedly. 

There are nine assorted vehicles trying to cross this river tonight. If anyone was watching - which apparently they were - it's no surprise they've been spotted. What the fuck? 

'What the fuck?' Pete says out loud, because it's a legitimate question. No-one told him he was gonna get shot at. Also no-one told him he was gonna get his fucking underwear soaked in cold, gross water, either, but whatever, priorities. 

'We can't just sit here,' says Patrick, tight and furious. Everyone's stopped, and there are pings and whistles and splashes around them. And screams. Before anyone can do anything sensible, like fucking grab him, Patrick's splashing off to the next nearest van like some kind of avenging … something. There's a gunshot and he ducks violently - his hat drops off him and he just keeps going. 

He's going to get himself killed, Pete's sure of it, but then Andy shoves him back into gear. 'Fucking _push_ , Pete,' he growls. 

Eight vans make it to the other side of the river, with Patrick the last onto dry land, helping to push the final van. The ninth van … stays in the river. Pete tries not to think about why. He just grabs Patrick as soon as he's within reach and ignores the fact that he squishes wetly when Pete hugs him. Their hearts are pounding. 

'If you get yourself killed, I'm gonna -' Pete chokes into Patrick's neck. 

'Write a song about it?' Patrick laughs, but it's thin, and he clings just as hard as Pete does. 

***

There's a kind of creeping numbness to not knowing what you're doing or where you're going that grows like the deadening of your fingertips against strings. Protective. And not that long ago maybe Pete would have railed about wanting to _feel_ things again but let's be real here, Pete really, truly, deeply feeling his feelings is not a helpful thing for anyone. 

Pete should find a warm body to try and give himself some kind of a shot in the arm against the creeping cold, but the one he wants isn't here.

Andy and Joe are having some kind of argument with the leaders of the Fall Out Boy mob, and Patrick's got his arms folded in a way that indicates he's about thirty seconds from wading in and then God help them all. Pete's shut himself in the van, but he can see them through the windows, at least until he lays down. 

His fingers find their way under the hem of his own t-shirt. He wraps himself up in his own hug.

Outside, he hears Joe say, '- fucking _lives_ we're talking here -' and someone shushing him. 

Pete flirts with the waistband of his own jeans, then decides, basically, fuck it, and slides a hand down to grab his own ass. 

This is what it would feel like, if he let Mikey do what he wanted. He squeezes, experimentally, and like … it's not that bad. A hand on his ass. It's fine. People grab his ass all the time, or they used to. 

Mikey wanted more than a grope, is the thing. Pete can feel the crack of his ass with one of his fingers, awkwardly and with his elbow starting to hurt, but he can kind of touch there if he strains. There's probably a more sensible way to do this but he's kind of committed now, lying on his side on the back seat of the van, face smushed into the seatback and smelling the lowgrade funk of too many miles and too many butts wearing too-long-unwashed jeans.

It's … it's not great, if he's honest. It's not terrible, but he doesn't see the point. 

He's kind of aware that he's built the whole .. ass thing … up in his head. Like, he's lucid enough to know that about himself. Maybe he should have just let Mikey do it. So that he'd know. 

But he's _allowed_ to have boundaries, fuck, enough therapists told him he should be trying to find them, and defending the ones he did have. He doesn't have to live through everything just to know what it's like. 

He shuffles himself so he's got more reach, and rubs two fingers up along where he assumes Mikey wanted to explore. Maybe it's no big deal. Hell, maybe he's missing out, because actual touching at his actual hole does make him shiver a little, catch his breath. Whatever else it is, it's sensitive. Confusing sensitive, but sensitive. 

If he told Mikey to be careful, Mikey would be. Mikey's always been careful with Pete - not gentle, necessarily, but careful. Fuck. Pete's qualifying every fucking statement tonight, even in his own head. 

He pulls his hands back out of his jeans. He's allowed to have boundaries. 

***

One page of the notebook is entirely blacked out with scribbling and charcoal from a fire by the next time he hands it to Patrick. 

'I don't even want to know,' says Patrick, flipping through the mess and finding that page with his usual unerring sense of direction about Pete's bullshit. 'Why do you still give me this if you don't want me to read it?'

'Paper's hard to get,' says Pete, shrugging. 'I want you to read the rest of it, don't worry. I'll wartime-censor anything for my eyes only.'

Nothing is for Pete's eyes only, even if he has to render it unreadable. Sometimes he thinks the thoughts in his head are only real if Patrick observes them. Or … no, maybe more like he can't pin them down, characterise them, til Patrick casts his eyes across each page and collapses the waveform. 

He frets that Patrick will find a way to read, as well as see, the words he tried to bury, but none of it makes its way out into the next set of poems-turned-lyrics, so maybe he's safe. 

The problem is he can't just corral all the shit onto a page and then blacken the page out and have that redact the thoughts. The thoughts stay. Somewhere in a very flat part of the country where the horizons are unsettlingly wide and the sky is a huge bowl above them, the streams of anarchists in vans somehow criss-cross each other again and Pete looks out the van window muzzily one morning to find that the lane next to them is occupied by the beaten-up, sticker-encrusted My Chem trailer. 

Gerard waves at him through their dusty rear window. Pete blinks and musters up the muscle control to wave back. It's dim inside but he can make out Mikey's bright-blonde hair, leaning on a shoulder that must belong to Toro. 

Someone offers Pete a drink, when they pitch camp, and he's been more grateful for things in his life but right this second he can't remember what they are. 

'The fuck is this?' he wheezes, after the first sip. 'It tastes like feet. Burning feet.'

The girl laughs. 'It's 80 proof, dude, who cares? But I did ferment it mostly in an old rubber boot, so, that might be what you're tasting. I promise I distilled it in glass. It's clean. It's just, uh, gross.'

'What do you want for it?' Pete asks. She takes three pairs of his socks and a granola bar in trade for the rest of the flask, and frankly it's three pairs of socks and a granola bar well spent, because he drinks enough of it that he stops tasting it, and then he really is numb. Numb enough that he finds himself a dark little corner between two parked cars and a barn wall, and tries to jerk off, except it's like trying to jerk off with mittens on your hands. His dick is hard but it … nothing works, nothing _works_ and he's grinding his teeth over it. 

He doesn't know where the impulse to actually put a finger up his actual ass comes from. 

(Liar. He's a liar.)

It hurts. Like it actually hurts, it's a struggle, to work it up there, and the sensitivity he remembers from before makes it a hot thrill for about ten seconds before it just aches. And yes, he's aware, belligerent and drunk and aware that he's drunk, that you should use lube, but exactly where is he supposed to get lube? 

He's curled up half in a ball with his hands all over his ass when he has the stupid thought that, weren't they always told it was sodomy that would lead to the end of the world? It makes him snort, which makes his body contract, which makes him gasp in pain and yank his fingers free.

There's still a few swallows left in the flask, so he pulls his jeans up and wipes his hands on the ground, and drinks them before he staggers back out to the actual party. 

Straight into Mikey Way. 

'The fuck is wrong with you, Pete?' Mikey asks, steadying him. His hands are so thin and cold. 'You alright?'

'I knew it would suck,' says Pete, lurching forward to bury his face in Mikey's shoulder (also thin, also cold, and somehow perfect despite it). 'Seriously. I knew it would be awful and it was, you should thank me.'

'What,' says Mikey, folding his arms around Pete and sighing, 'the everloving fuck are you even talking about?'

'Awful,' Pete repeats. Mikey sshes him bluntly and makes him sit down, or at least, collapse, so they're a semi-heap on the ground near a fire. 'Hurts.'

Mikey stiffens under him, and then tugs a hand in his hair til Pete looks up at him. 'What hurts, Pete?' he asks. 'Did someone hurt you?'

'Hurt myself,' says Pete. 'Like that's new.' He snorts at himself. 

'Don't fuck around,' Mikey says, and tightens his grip in Pete's hair. 'Where do you hurt? Tell me.'

Pete waves a hand vaguely at his ass, sprawled across Mikey's lap. It's not that bad any more, it's just the memory of it. 'You wanted to - so I tried it.' He pulls himself up to lean against Mikey's chest. Mikey's hand drops out of his hair to steady him. 'And it hurts, Mikeyway, I told you. I told you I didn't want it.'

Mikey's gone still under him, even his breathing seems to have stopped. Pete tips his chin up. 'Mikey?'

'You're such a fucking idiot,' Mikey says, and Pete squints at him. 

'I just -'

'Maybe you should have stopped when it started hurting.'

Pete wriggles til he doesn't need Mikey to prop him up anymore, which sucks and his head kind of goes _whoooOOOooo_ weirdly but seems important. 'I had to know,' he says, willing Mikey to understand. 'You - I couldn't just. I had to know before I. Or if I - I had to _know_.'

'You were doing it wrong if it hurt you. Moron,' Mikey says very softly, in a voice that's a little bit shaky. Pete wonders if he's been drinking too. If he has it doesn't smell as bad as whatever it was Pete drank. 'You should have stopped,' he says again.

'I can't believe you wanted to do that to me,' Pete says, poking at Mikey's chest, trying to raise a smile, but Mikey won't smile. 

'You're such a stupid, selfish jackass,' Mikey growls at him. He makes like he's going to stand, and Pete clutches at him. He pushes him away. 'Call me when you're sober, I guess. Find me. Whatever. Or, no, actually? Don't. Don't find me ever again, if you really don't like or trust me that much, if you think I would _hurt you_ to get my fucking rocks off.'

'Why so upset?' Pete asks, when Mikey's standing. He hauls himself up and it's an effort. 'I saved you the work, that's all. Turns out I really don't like it.'

Mikey just looks at him and says, again, harsh in a soft voice, 'it doesn't have to hurt, Pete. It shouldn't hurt.'

***

It takes Pete three days to fully sober up (he keeps having a hair of the dog) but when he does, he realises Mikey wasn't just talking about fucking.

***

The van sways violently when someone slams the door and basically lands on Pete, who's been trying and failing to sleep on the middle bench seat. 

A mop of stringy brown hair and a couple of blue-green-red-grey arms are in Pete's lap. 'Hey, Andy,' he says, a little breathless from the weight to his torso. 'You okay, man?'

'Sorry,' says Andy, levering himself up. 'Didn't think anyone was in here.'

Pete squirms back til he can sit up and Andy can sit next to him. 'You're not okay,' he says, because that fucking much is obvious if _Andy's_ trying to hide in the van. 'You want me to fuck off, or -'

'No, it's fine.' 

It's patently not fine, but Andy stretches his legs out to rest on the vinyl-covered edge of the engineblock that the front seats are bolted to, and Pete would have to crawl over him to get out, so he just. Lets Andy relax into the shitty upholstery and does the same. 

He tries to say things about ten times but every opener shrivels on his tongue, because no-one, fucking no-one, does withering silence like Andy, and even Pete's ability to bring the noise can't stand in the … glacial boulder field of a real Andy mood. 

If it was Joe he'd at least like, knock knees with him and try for a grin, like, _hey man, I got you_ but Andy's projecting a fucking forcefield or something. Pete briefly considers hurling himself out the side window but he doesn't need a goddamn broken rib, like, seriously. 

Eventually Andy pulls his knees in and curls up around them. Pete can't see his face for hair when he says, 'you know I don't … want the world to be like this, right?'

Oh. 

'Yeah, man, I know you don't. No-one does.'

Andy peeks at him over his knees and he looks gutshot. 

Pete isn't a violent guy but he'd punch the person who did that, because he knows exactly what they must have said. And it's a fucking cheap shot, okay? Andy didn't like the world the way it was, and he never made a secret of that. But Pete's ridden alongside him under decadent capitalism and under post-apocalyptic whatever and y'know what? The roads are shitty full of potholes both ways and the food's terrible both ways and what Andy wants to stop is people being trodden on and guess what - that _hasn't_ stopped. 

But yeah, maybe on the outside, total fucking chaos looks like the popculture idea of anarchy. 

Whoever Andy was arguing with, implying that he's happy in this doom spiral they're living in is a dick move. 

But Pete's not gonna argue Andy's own politics to him. 

He leans over til he can put his head on Andy's shoulder. 'Fuck them,' he says softly. 'What the fuck do they know?'

'Well, right now they're trying to convince the others we should be going south for the winter,' says Andy. He's apparently not going to name and shame the person he fought with. 

Pete doesn't know why that's bad - birds go south when the cold weather hits, it doesn't sound like such a stupid idea for a bunch of idiots who travel in vans with weak or broken heating and a fuel economy problem that's bad enough as it is. But the way Andy says it tells him it's a bad idea. 

'We won't do any _good_ down there,' Andy mutters into his own knees, and there we go. There's a reason.

'Where do you wanna go?' Pete asks, tucking himself up tighter to Andy's side, seeing as he hasn't been kicked off yet.

'Joe and Patrick and I were thinking,' says Andy. 'Remember those fuckwits that shot us up?'

'Hard to forget,' says Pete as drily as he can. 'Wait, you don't wanna -'

'They're killing people to steal their food,' Andy says. 'They're trading firearms and that shitty meth people are cooking out of expired cold meds. And scuttlebutt says they're controlling three different bridges now, Pete. It's not okay.'

Pete wants to ask, what the fuck are they meant to do? Make axes out of their guitars and go in like that? They've been living like the bottom-billing bands on a nightmare perpetual Warped Tour for, god, maybe a couple of years now - and suddenly three-quarters of Fall Out Boy wants to go to war? 

'We've got a plan,' says Andy. 'Sort of. And we can make it better, if people will just -' He sighs so heavy it's got a gut-deep growl underneath it. 'Do we save our own asses now and let this get worse? What happens when we need to go up there again? What happens to everyone else who needs to cross that fucking river, Pete?'

Pete doesn't know. Pete, he'd like to point out, isn't the one who's been arguing with Andy over this. This whole time, Pete has gone where they took him, and not asked any questions more complex than where the next meal was coming from, and frankly he's not really planning on changing that policy. Everyone knows what happens when you let Pete be in charge of shit. 

'Tell me who to punch,' he says into Andy's shoulder. 'And I'll punch them for you.'

Andy snorts softly. 

'I'm serious. I got your back, Hurley.'

Andy's silences when he doesn't know what to say have a different tenor to them than his furious silences. 

'S'gonna suck, iced up roads and no fucking heating, though.'

That gets words back out of Andy. 'Yeah, because we've been living in the lap of luxury up til now. Whatever. We'll huddle like penguins. You know it'd just be fucking sweat and bad weed and tents made of tarps if we went south, anyway.' 

He's not wrong, is the thing. 

Pete shuts his eyes, tries to shift his temple off Andy's clavicle but there's not a lot of Andy that isn't bony to swap it for. Better than the van window as a pillow, though. It doesn't matter either way - black ice or tent city, because maybe Pete would like to fly south for the winter, but not if the rest of his flock's going north. 

***

There is, not to put too fine a point on it, a massive fucking argument, and Pete isn't sure if Andy, Joe and Patrick win or lose, but seven vans go south. The generator trailer, the amps, all of that, goes south with them, in the name of travelling light. 

The Damned Things van is going north alone, a stand-in for the bus to Hell. 

Pete pats his P bass as he shuts the lid on it the last time, and doesn't know how to feel about the idea that it's dead weight, or about the fact that no-one said a word about him keeping his notebooks. He like, he gets it? That the music was just sugarcoating, a pretty lie, when really this all stopped being about music a long time ago. It's always been about what they believe in, it's just that -

It's just that, when he didn't know up from down or why he was even here, what he was here _for_ , Pete always told himself he believed in the music.

Joe starts the van and Patrick yanks Pete into it, shuts the door behind him and it crunches shut with a finality. Patrick even left his shitty acoustic with the whaney fretboard behind. He leans into Pete as they pull out of the parking lot, and Pete wonders if it feels as weird to him, or weirder, maybe. It makes sense. It just. It's a repurposing. You have to make choices, about direction and motivation and purpose, right? 

You have to choose your weapons. 

Joe turns up the volume on the mostly crapped out stereo. 

Pete pulls out his pen.

***

Joe swears violently under his breath and Pete does his best to not faint, and to remember enough of a prayer to float one up into the violet edge of the sky, and in one hard, fast movement, shoves Joe's shoulder back into its socket.

The swearing goes from sotto voce to fucking fortissimo and then back down to weak, wheezing silence in the skin of a minute, and then Joe shudders away from where Pete's holding his weight, and says, 'thanks.'

Pete says, 'you wanna keep that arm elevated for a while, bud.'

'Yeah, yeah. Not my first rodeo, Wentz.'

Going north has kind of chewed them all up and spat them out again. There's black ice, and they're running the van on agricultural diesel that's not the right mix, and without a guitar Patrick's pissy. The soundtrack is growling - bellies, engines, people. 

Pete takes Joe's hand, sweaty and cold-clammy, and puts it pointedly on his opposite shoulder. 'Keep that there, numbnuts,' he says. 'I don't have a fucking sling for you so you gotta remember, okay?'

Joe rolls his eyes and busses a kiss against Pete's sweaty hairline. 

'And next time look where you're putting your feet,' Pete adds, but he's not mad. It's just that they need to get back on the road.

He doesn't shove Joe back in the van, he helps him in, but he makes sure to let Joe push him away when he's done, and then sit next to him so he can lean on Pete rather than on the van wall on his other side. 

Patrick's driving, so the front seat is pulled up close, meaning they've got some leg room in the back. He's fiddling with his mirrors when Andy clambers into the passenger's side, swaddled in a very old, very worse for wear Fuck City hoodie.

No-one says a word as they pull back out onto the pockmarked road, and Pete just. Doesn't want to be here. Doesn't want to be here and doesn't want to be doing what they're doing. Doesn't want to be the only person apparently burdened with the premonitions of doom he's burdened with, but there's no way that this fucking Hail Mary play doesn't end in …

Whatever. He just hopes it's him, if someone's going down (he doesn't fill in the last word, he doesn't). Because if it isn't him, if he has to watch while Patrick, or Joe, or Andy … he doesn't know what he'll do. 

The sun's going down already, the road is a juddering grey void, wet with rain, and Pete has nothing but bad feelings. Like, hey Fate. If you're gonna pick someone, pick me. I volunteer, I guess.

 _Hey Fate_ he scribbles in his notebook. It feels like the beginning of a bridge. He can hear it in Patrick's voice, in the grungy little kicked-puppy yelp he used to do and worked so hard to train himself out of. _Hey Fate --_ and his erratically jerking elbow bumps Joe's arm. 

'Ah, fuck,' Joe snarls, and curls away. Pete winces. 

'Sorry, buddy,' he says, but Joe doesn't respond, just pulls himself over further, away from Pete. 

Neither of the two up front even say a word, and the radio crapped out in this grindingly bad weather hours ago. The van is just a misery place to be, a tiny sliver of the real world nested inside a horrible unreality, like a reverse snowglobe, or the inside of a pearl. Like a spell or a dream or something that could be broken in a snap. A glass case, a specimen jar, the thing you break in case of emergency, or maybe Pandora's box, inverted.

Either way, Pete doesn't want to know what happens when the veil between the inside and the outside gets pierced and whatever's outside gets in. 

Pete writes that down, the whole list, keeping his elbow low and out of Joe's way as much as he can, and then he redacts half the words, til the page looks as fragile and cracked as the concepts he spilled all over it. 

Eventually they do have to stop, for gas, and for food, and Pete helps Joe out of the van because he's not a dick, despite the visceral urge to never even take his seatbelt off again. He sort of rallies a little bit, out in the snap frozen air, and then when they climb back in for the second leg of the day's driving it's like, less of an agoraphobia feeling.

Andy takes over the driving, Joe slides into the front seat away from Pete's scratching pen and jogging elbow, and Patrick colonises the far back seat, and won't stop tapping. He hasn't stopped tapping since he had to leave his guitar behind, except for when he was behind the wheel. At first Pete wondered if it was just the novelty of having leg-room. There hasn't been this much space in a Fall Out Boy van ever - at first when they had vans the vans also had Andy's drumset and three amplifier cabs and three head units and however many guitars they were running on between Patrick and Joe and if they were lucky enough to have a spare at that point in time. Pete's bass, which didn't even have a gig bag, right at the start, let alone a decent flight case or whatever, would be sort of on the floor between Pete's legs with the neck up between his thighs, a desperate attempt to keep it at least kind of safe. 

Then they had a trailer, but that just meant they could carry more merch, so they did. At no point did they ever have a van and places to put their feet that didn't lead to cramp. But now there's shit-all in this van that isn't their water supplies, canned food, and bedding.

The buses they used to have in between these two end-points are a fever dream.

More than once Pete's wondered if Fall Out Boy was a hallucination he had, and never quite woke up from.

***

Pete wakes up with a start, a violent snort caught somewhere in his throat, at the sound of the engine cutting. He coughs, hacking phlegm from the painful stretch of cartilage rings that forms the column of his throat. 

'Winter fucking sucks,' he growls. 'We stopping?'

'Yeah,' says Patrick, who's driving now. He waves out the windshield, and Pete pulls himself up to look at the road ahead, which has … disappeared, in a wash of milky grey. As Pete watches, big, downy flakes patter against the glass.

'Shit.'

'That's about the summary of it,' says Andy, twisting in his seat so he can climb over into Pete's space. 'Get up here, Trohman,' he throws at Joe, who's curled in the far back seat. 'It's huddle or freeze.'

Joe rolls himself over the back of Pete's seat and half into Pete's lap, which is also partially occupied by Andy already. 'Patrick, c'mon.' 

Patrick rolls his eyes - Pete can see it in the rearview. 'I'm coming, jeez.' It's harder to get out of the driver's seat, you have to get over the centre console and twist awkwardly to not kick the horn or the stick shift, and Patrick would be the first to admit he's not the most graceful of them. Eventually he manages it, and then it's a pile of four of them all over each other's laps in the back seat, pulling every item of bedding they collectively own around them. 

In the stratigraphy of who hit the seat first, Pete's at the bottom, and that's the warmest place, but he's worried about Joe, with his bad back still sore from that fall, still favouring his arm even if he's trying not to say it, and he's worried about Andy, who's losing muscle mass without cruelty-free protein to keep him going, and he's worried about Patrick, who's gone from constantly furious to quiet, too quiet. So he shuffles himself sideways til he's the one between Andy and the van's cold steel wall, and makes sure that there's sufficient crusty blanket over the other three as well. Joe ended up on the other outside. Pete leans his chin on the top of Andy's head and catches Joe's eye. 'You got enough space over there?' he mouths. 

Joe nods awkwardly over Patrick's face buried in the seat-back so that he doesn't have to bury it in Joe's sternum. Pete kind of wants to reach out for the hand Joe has spread over the pile of all of them, but that's his sore arm, and Pete's already fucking bumped him enough on this trek. 

The temperature in here's already starting to drop, but y'know what, it's better to be cold than to leave the engine going and die of carbon monoxide poisoning if the snow manages to block the vents. 

Andy rotates his body a few times, screwing himself into the huddle like twisting a puzzle piece or a USB stick around and around til you find the best fit. Pete feels bad about how good it feels when he finally settles, one hand fisted in Pete's shirt, to be a human in an interlock with other humans, as good as it ever felt on stage to ratchet into the breathing counting gestalt of a song. 

He craves that. He craves in general, but he craves … being a part of. A part of anything, really, but a part of this, specifically and always. 

Patrick makes a noise. He doesn't crave this, Pete knows that well and good - has to ration his Patrick-contact the same as they ration their diesel, and he's glad Patrick's jammed up against Joe instead, so Pete can't outstay his welcome while asleep. 

Given how badly Pete used to behave last time they were a van band, he's still pretty sure it's a miracle these three came back for him at all. He snuggles down around Andy and pulls his arm across him and Patrick. He can at least be some kind of insulation. That's a use.

***

When Pete wakes up, the sun is shining anaemically through the van windows, Andy's elbow is in his ribcage, Joe's hair is in his mouth, and Patrick appears to have vanished, although levering himself up as much as he can without dislodging his bandmates allows Pete to realise that Patrick and an appreciable portion of their collective bedding relocated to the back-backseat sometime in the night.

He flops back down again. He's not cold, and now he knows where the others all are, he can try and rest some more. 

Or at least he can lay still some more, and try and surreptitiously spit out the hair.

Joe drags himself up eventually, props himself on his non-fucked-up arm awkwardly and looks down at Pete. 'I think I drooled on you.' He pokes a spot on Pete's shoulder that feels damp.

Pete shrugs as much as he can with Andy contorted all the way along his side. 'You've done worse.'

'I need a piss,' 

'Okay, well you can fucking go outside for that.'

Joe cracks a grin and shuffles backwards off Pete, Andy and the seat, and opens the van door. The smell of after-rain and frozen mud thawing floods in, as does the sunshine. There are piles of snow starting to melt out there, and Joe staggers, still half asleep on his feet, outwards from the van. Pete returns his attention to the more immediate problem of Andy deciding that the brisk fresh air means he needs to be better wedged in between Pete and the upholstery. 

Pete puts up with it for about a minute and then one of Andy's knees ends up sharply in his groin.

'Ow, dude,' he says, sitting up. 'C'mon, that's a party foul.'

'Hmmwh?' says Andy, blinking at him. Pete pushes at his legs until Andy's feet are on the floor and he has to sit up or get a right-angle put into his spine. 'Oh, sorry.'

There's a noise from Patrick that strongly indicates that he's considering homicide if they don't all shut up. Andy rolls his eyes, fishes under the seat for a moment and comes up with a hoodie that at this point legitimately could be anyone's - there's the remains of a print on the back of it but it's peeled away and unrecognisable - and hops out of the van shrugging it on over the hoodie he's already wearing. 

'I take it you don't want to take the first shift driving?' Pete says to the empty air between the seats. 

'Fuck off,' says Patrick. 

Pete sighs and reaches into one of the cruddy old plastic boxes they keep the food in, and fishes out a lumpy thing that's probably one of the homemade granola bars they traded for a while back, wrapped in clingwrap. He tosses it over the backseat and tries not to take a mild amount of sadistic pleasure in the small thud it makes when it hits Patrick somewhere. 'Cheer up, Charlie,' he says. 

Patrick doesn't say anything. 

Joe shoves his head back in the van. 'Andy found more mushrooms. Who wants to play roulette?'

'Stop calling my cooking 'roulette',' says Andy, poking his head in next to Joe.

'I'm just saying. Do you know how many poisonous species of mushroom there are in the continental United States?'

'No, but neither do you.'

'If I eat Andy's mushrooms and die, I won't have to be awake, cold, and listening to this bullshit,' says Patrick, sitting up at last. 'Someone light a fucking fire already.'

***

The van smells of damp burned wood when they finish eating. The mushrooms are delicious, and Pete doesn't tell Andy that but he bumps shoulders with him and takes Andy's plate as well as his own outside to wipe off, which is basically the same thing, isn't it? 

He also volunteers to drive, as long as Andy navigates. 

'I don't know where the fuck we're going, man,' he points out while he's adjusting the seat, and Andy sighs. It's half an hour into the drive, when both Patrick and Joe are snoring again already, before he opens his mouth, though. Typical Hurley. 

'You didn't have to come with us if you didn't want to,' he says softly. 'We're not trying to make you do anything you don't agree with, Pete, and we're not fucking joined at the hip. If you wanted to go south, you could have.'

'Yeah,' says Pete. 'And I would have. Shut the fuck up, Hurley.'

'No-one asked you to be a martyr to the cause.'

'I'm not. I'm just driving.' Pete sighs. He does get where Andy's coming from, or maybe more like, he sees what Andy's seeing. He has enough self-awareness to know how he looks. 'It's not like I don't think this is important,' he says. 'I just. I'm on board, but I'm not the guy you want steering. You know that, Andy, you fucking _know_ what happens when I get … whatever.' He drums his fingers on the steering wheel and continues to stare straight ahead a the road. 'Just tell me where you want to go and we'll go there, alright?'

Andy sighs. 'Keep on straight,' he says.

There isn't a turn-off in view at all, but Pete says thanks anyway, because it's a truce buried in a metaphor and he's grateful for both. 

Then something flashes in front of him, a deer? - Andy grabs the wheel because Pete's frozen, and they nearly end up in a ditch. 'What the fuck?' Pete demands, wrestling back control. They're on the wrong side of the road, not that anyone cares anymore when there's no-one in sight and - 

'Fucking pull over,' says Andy, and Pete's already hit the brakes because his rearview is full of someone passed out in the mostly-eroded median strip. Someone, half in and half out of a pothole, that he nearly ran over. 

Someone not a deer, someone with arms and legs and a head they're raising slowly

Andy's out the passenger door before the van's even come to a real halt. Pete jams the parking brake on as soon as he can and throws himself out in Andy's wake. They pound down the dusty flat-packed, washboarded road out of time and out of sync, Andy in the lead, but Pete knows that sweaty, grown-out emo fringe that's hanging so low it's grazing the pitted asphalt.

It's close, but when the dust settles, it's Pete that got there first.

****

Mikey's knees are scratched and bleeding, full of dirt. Pete and Andy got him back to the van but he slumped to the ground before they could get him inside, and now he's sitting on the remains of the tar seal, leaning against one of the back tyres. Mikey stares at the dripping ruin of the torn-up knee-peaks of his jeans, and Pete stares at Mikey. 

'Mikey, what happened?'

Mikey shrugs. His nose was bleeding at some point, there's a crust of brown in smeared drips down over his upper lip. And he's sunburned, which means he must have been out a long time. The sun is not exactly trying its hardest out here lately. The worst of the cold broke with that last storm, but it's still not warm.

'Here,' says Patrick, scrambling out of the back of the van with one of their water canteens. 'Mikey, hold out your hands.'

Mikey does as he's told. His fists uncurl - and they're full of blood and grit, like he's been holding onto the road for dear life. 'Jesus fucking Christ,' says Patrick, and Mikey immediately curls back up again, like a snail into its shell. 'No, don't - ' Patrick takes hold of Mikey's wrist and pulls at his fingers again. 'We gotta get these clean, c'mon.'

Mikey hisses, and Patrick dribbles water into the cuts to wash the dirt away, uses his fingertips to try and lever out the grit. Mikey's palms drip, red then pink then clear, and he tries to pull away but Patrick has him firmly. Pete couldn't do it, even though it's the right thing to do. Pete couldn't cause him hurt like that. Pete can't play that kind of a long game, he's never been able to. Pete lets Mikey lean into his side, instead, tries to take the pain into himself, and … selfishly, lets Patrick be the one to do the hurting.

Mikey's sobbing by the time they get to his crusted-up knees, and Pete pulls him down a little so he can cradle Mikey's head against his shoulder. Joe puts a blanket around both of their shoulders, and crouches down on his haunches beside Pete. 'We gotta move,' he says quietly. 'We're close to that fucking river crossing from last time we were up here, except there are buildings on this bank now. I don't like it. Can you get him into the van?'

Patrick caps the now-empty water bottle. 'I wish we had some fucking bandages,' he says, tipping Mikey's right hand this way and that, inspecting the damage. 'It's just scraped up, but it's bleeding so much.' Mikey pulls his hand away and clenches it up again.

'I can get myself into the van,' he says hoarsely. He thrusts himself up onto his feet and almost topples over, unable to counterbalance. Pete grabs for him frantically, and so do Patrick and Joe, and they almost all go over in the process, but at the end of it they're all standing, even Mikey. 

It's tenuous. He shakes himself, shakes them off, and stutters his way around the van til he finds the door, and clambers awkwardly into the very back. He leaves a trail of partial prints, brown-red and smeary, first on the paintwork, and then on the upholstery.

Pete hesitates long enough that there's a pileup behind him, and then Patrick shoves him into following Mikey into the back seat. 

'Shut the fucking door,' says Andy, from the driver's seat. 'We gotta get out of here before they catch us.'

'Shit, already?' Joe says, in the front passenger's seat. 

Andy, peeling off the side of the road and clearly with his foot flat to the floor before Patrick manages to slam the sliding door, jerks his chin at the rearview. Pete twists in his seat to look out the back window and realises there's a dust cloud blooming back the way they came, or rather, the way they were going before Andy pulled this U-turn. 

'We're fucked,' says Mikey dully.

'We're not fucked,' says Patrick. 'Where are the rest of your guys?'

Mikey doesn't say anything. 

'What the fuck _happened?'_

He still doesn't say anything. 

'Whoa whoa, hey, pull over,' says Joe all of a sudden. 'Dude, pull over.'

'The fuck? No! I'm not gonna fucking pull over, it's like Mad Max out there,' says Andy. 

Pete, watching the dust cloud get bigger and seeing how it's nucleated around something a shit-load bigger than the van, agrees. Don't fucking pull over. Pete may not like his life in most respects but he likes that it's still ongoing. 

'What do you want to pull over for?' Andy demands. 'It's too late, anyway, we're past whatever it was.'

'It was the My Chem van,' says Joe, strained and sarcastic. 'Mostly wrapped around a tree. Y'know. If that's at all relevant.'

'Just keep driving,' says Mikey. 'There's no-one in it, if that's - fuck. Just. Keep driving.'

He buries his face in Pete's shoulder, and if Pete's skin is wet and slick and too-warm under him two minutes later, if he can feel the way Mikey's shifting side to side like he's trying to wipe his eyes, Pete isn't going to say anything, about that or about the bloodbrown palmprint on the denim covering his thigh.

Andy keeps driving, but Patrick turns around. 'If there's no-one in it,' he says, and Pete can feel how hard he's working to keep his voice calm, 'where are they?'

Mikey pulls himself up to sitting, and shrugs in the direction of out the back window. 'Gerard told me to get out,' he says. He's so hoarse Pete's own throat works against itself in sympathy. 

'Get out of where?' Patrick asks, at the same time as Andy swears not even a little bit under his breath. 'Back there? They're in that camp?'

'We're going back,' says Andy, and the van judders so hard Pete's genuinely worried the chassis is going to come apart when he hits the brake pedal. It's so fucking typical Andy, that _no fuck off we're not going back_ does a literal 180 when it turns out someone else is in the crosshairs.

'No!' Mikey grabs for the seat in front as the brakeforce jolts them all forward. 'We need to get some fucking help, we can't go back!'

'There's no other cavalry for miles,' Andy says, arm thrown over the headrest behind Joe, pulling a million point turn on the pockmarked road because this van has the turning circle of a moon. 'We are the help, Mikey, we're all you've got, and you're fucking lucky we're even here. No-one else would come up here with us. What the fuck were you guys _doing_ up here?'

'Pull off the fucking road,' Mikey's pleading. 'They're gonna catch us, just - get off the road and I'll tell you all of it, I promise, just. _Please_ Andy. Please.'

Andy, halfway through his turn and ninety degrees to the road, checks back the way they came and swears under his breath. Then he puts his foot down.

'Fuck!' says Joe, his shoulder slamming into the side of the passenger door as they hit the first … bump, pothole, log, something - and he wrenches his seatbelt on in a hurry. Pete clings to Mikey in desperation and they duck low on the seat, trying to avoid jolting into hitting the ceiling. 

The van becomes a moshpit - everyone's hands up in the air - for so long after that that Pete loses track of everything but the juddering and the desperation of listening for other engines over the roar of the abused one under the hood of the van. He just holds tight to Mikey, and can't even find it in himself to pray.

By the time they stop, it's dark out and the van's anaemic headlights are giving up. Everything that can rattle, as well as everything that shouldn't be rattling, is rattling, including Pete's brains inside his skull and Mikey's teeth where he's plastered up against Pete's shoulder face first. 

But the most important thing is, there are no lights following them. 

Andy throws the thing into park and kills the engine, lets darkness and silence descend, and it's like the world holds its breath. They've terrified whatever the fuck lives in this forest into quiet for now - is there still an engine note following them?

The sound of trees settling back, branches creaking where the van bent them back, scraping the shitty paintwork like fingernails on a blackboard. 

A cricket, a long way away. Then another. 

Something that's probably a bird. A night bird? An owl? An owl, maybe, close by. 

Nothing. No engines. No pursuit. 

Everything hangs for a long moment and then Mikey says, 'they ran us off the road.'

He unfolds the story in halting little half-sentences, bit by bit, shifting away from Pete on the seat and curling up around himself. 

The My Chem boys didn't know there was anything out of the ordinary up here when they decided to leave their kids in the desert with the C4, and come north. Patrick wants to know why they were heading this way and Mikey just says it doesn't matter. They were looking for - it doesn't matter. They didn't get far enough to find whatever it was. They weren't expecting to get hit off the road by the fucking border patrol from someone's inbred little fantasy river kingdom.

God, it fucks Pete off so bad his teeth grind, that someone's trying to be the King of Chicago. Of all places - it feels personal even though he knows it can't be.

It takes him a while to notice, because they're not touching any more, but Mikey's starting to shiver. 'They had guns,' he says, shakily, 'some of them wanted to just get rid of us, but some of them were, I dunno, squeamish I guess. One of them recognised Frank and that was a whole fucking shit-show, but I guess it saved our necks in the end.'

He bites his lip. 'Or, mine, anyway. They wanted to discuss it more so they moved us from their stupid truck into some building and they left us alone, and … Gerard told me to go.'

'Why just you?' Joe asks. The windows are starting to fog up with their breath as the temperature drops outside. 'Why didn't you all get out?'

Mikey's voice cracks. 'Gerard couldn't walk.'

'But Frank and Ray -'

'They wouldn't leave him.'

Pete feels that in his gut, the pain in Mikey's voice. Why, in the name of god, would you ask him to leave his brother? Only Gerard could even ask it, or would think of doing it.

'I had the best shot of making it out, I guess.'

Or he was the only one of the three of them who'd do it when Gerard begged him, in the pinch. Pete puts his arm back around Mikey, and flinches when his wrist glances against the bare place where Mikey's shirt is riding up. 'Shit, you're cold,' he says, shocked into saying it when he didn't mean to interrupt. 'Hey, c'mere.' Mikey fights him for ten seconds and then his cracked, scabbed palms crab up in Pete's lap, and he leans into the embrace.

He's so, so cold. So fucking cold, and he's shaking. 

'We're going back for them,' says Andy. There's no compromise in his voice. Mikey makes a noise and Pete shushes him gently. 

'In the morning,' Joe adds, and Patrick, eyeing Mikey, murmurs agreement, and then pushes a bunch of their bedding, smelling warm-musty and old, over the back of the seat he's on into Pete's lap. 

'Get some sleep,' he adds. 

Pete looks at Mikey, and is pretty sure that's not going to happen. He cocoons them up together anyway. 

The van descends into silence and the dark, the last noises audible being Joe and Andy clambering over into the middle back seat with Patrick, and the three of them arranging themselves in a penguin huddle. Patrick makes his usual protest noises at having to share. Someone farts. 

Mikey's fists are locked in Pete's shirt, and his breath is a desperately-controlled, repetitive sobbing. Pete presses his mouth to Mikey's grown-out buzzcut hair, strokes his back, rocks him as best as he can without making the seat creak and keeping everyone else awake, but Mikey doesn't settle and Pete … well, Pete doesn't either.

***

The cold lake Pete's been metaphorically been floating face down in washes him finally to the shore the next morning. The shorebirds of reality call like kittiwakes around him in the sounds of his friends waking up, and Mikey, dirty and bloody, is sprawled across his chest, poking at his own hands and making hurt little noises when the cuts open up. It's a hard awakening, on a hard coastline - it’s rough. It grinds under him, again, metaphorically, but also kinda really, the gravel of reality under his skin but also the gravel ground into the van carpet, and the dirt still ground into Mikey's palms. 

‘Hey,’ Pete says sleepily, ‘Stop that.’

‘They itch,’ Mikey whispers at him, and the part of Pete that set Joe’s shoulder knows it has to do something. And doesn’t. They’re warm. Mikey’s still again. The universe can fuck off. 

But things fall apart and the centre cannot hold, not even for a morning’s worth of denial, and when the movement of someone waking up properly starts to rock the suspension, Pete looks up and sees that today, Andy’s the first out. The rush of cold when he opens the van door is fucking horrific, but it doesn’t take long before first Joe and then Patrick follow him. ‘We’re going to go look at that fucking encampment,’ says Patrick. ‘You guys stay here, stay warm. We shouldn’t be long.’

Mikey mutters something and Pete nods. Patrick gives him a too-long look. 'Take care of him, yeah?'

Pete hoped the cold dirty water, the glacier runoff pooling over his soul, would numb his feelings, but he's never been a still-waters-run-deep kind of a guy, he's a Grade Five deathtrap, he's turbulence personified, and he finally comes crunching back into his own body with Mikey's hands held in his as he tries again to get crud out of the sticky scrapes without completely undoing what healing has been done. 

It's going to take so much time to heal. But it is healing. Even since last night, a little bit has grown back. Another little tag of skin has hitched itself back down. 

Pete puts his scrap of cloth, bloodbrown, down on the seat, and finds a smile deep in his chest to give to Mikey. 'You're going to get better,' he says softly. Mikey's fingers flutter in his.

'Guess so.' Mikey hooks his pinky in Pete's, like he needs an anchor but that's the only link in the chain he's willing to connect. He's being so frugal in the comfort he'll take from Pete, like he's terrified of using him up, somehow. Pete curls into him, pulls him close. 

'You okay?' Mikey asks him softly. 'You're all -' He reaches out and smooths the tips of two fingers down the centre of Pete's forehead. 'What are you keeping up there?'

'Nothing,' Pete shrugs. Mike touches his mouth very softly for a second, and then lets his hand drop back into his lap. Pete is suddenly acutely aware that they're alone in the van, and his breath dies in his throat. 

Mikey makes an abortive noise, and their eyes meet, and Pete expects, anticipates, _wants_ the kiss he knows Mikey's thinking of giving him but it … never comes. 

Mikey licks his lips and then he leans back into the corner between the pillar and the backseat. 'C'mere,' he says. That's all he says. That's all he needs to say - Pete goes. He lays his head down in Mikey's lap and Mikey pets him softly.

Pete's … Pete's a mess, and they're alone, and Mikey wants to kiss him but instead he's just gently carding his fingers through the fluffy chaos of Pete's hair. He cares, Pete realises - again, not a revelation, but a sudden moment of understanding something he's known for a long time. 

'I'm sorry,' he says, into Mikey's skinny thigh. 'I'm sorry, Mikeyway. I thought.'

Mikey tugs his hair a little. 'Hmm?'

Pete rolls onto his back. 'That you just wanted to fuck me.'

That startles a laugh out. Mikey tucks a lock of Pete's hair back away from his face. 'I did,' he says, with a _well duh_ lilt to his voice. 'And you didn't want to. Sorry I was a dick about it, it's cool. It's not actually compulsory to be into me.'

Pete stares up at him, his big lovely eyes all gleaming with some kind of self-deprecation tinged with … regret? Pain? 'I guess I grew an ego somewhere along the way,' he says. Pete nuzzles at his thigh. 

_Yeah, but I'm into ... something. I'm into you, Mikeyway_

He doesn't say it. Not with all this time and privacy, pregnant with potential. Not with that sadness there. Not with blood in Mikey's scraped-up lifelines and his boys, his brother, god knows where, god knows how hurt. 

But that's just it. Mikey was interested in … whatever. Fucking. Like it wasn't that big a deal, that having sex like that, or … or at all, just wasn't that big a deal. Mikey wasn't trying to take, or to give, or to do anything other than feel. In this stupid numb limbo that they haven't even had to die to achieve, Mikey just wanted to be dumb and human together.

It was Pete that made it weird. Mikey just wanted to do something fun, soft and good together, to try and forget where they actually were. When Pete said no, actually said it, actually said he wanted something else, Mikey went with it, but Pete was so caught up in not wanting to fuck.

He still doesn't want to fuck, but that doesn't mean he doesn't want Mikey.

Pete leans up to kiss him, and Mikey cries out a tiny little hurt noise, kissing back for a split second and then pulling back. 'Pete. I can't,' he says. Shaky. 'I. I'm so fucking scared, Pete, I can't - it's too much.'

'Okay, it's okay,' says Pete, even though it isn’t. He’s so fucking grateful when Andy comes back to tell them that the compound’s perimeter goes further than they thought, that Patrick and Joe are still mapping it but that they’ll be a few hours yet, and he can tell Andy to stay with Mikey. 

‘I’ll go look for something to eat,’ he says, practically jumping out of the van and landing face first in the mud when his feet slip on the gritty ex-carpet. 

Andy gives him a Look. Mikey … doesn’t. Pete takes both of these things as implicit instructions to get the fuck out of here.

***

He comes back with the bottom of his t-shirt distorted into a muddy bag for hauling the scrappy little potatoes he found growing in the opposite direction from the way Joe and Patrick went off. 

Mikey leans into his side while they bake them in the fire pit Andy dug, like nothing happened, like Pete didn’t overstep his bounds before. But he’s shaking, and this close to the fire it isn’t that cold. 

***

Pete's notebook is in the van’s glove compartment, also known as halfway across the world away from him, trapped, in another dimension, somewhere he can't get to. 

Mikey doesn't cry any more, except when Pete cleans his hands off every morning. 

'Ahh - fuck,' he hisses, his knees jerking up towards his chest, almost knocking himself backwards onto the van floor, from his perch half in, half out of the side door. Pete makes an abortive motion to catch him, but Mikey throws himself forward again, and they collide. 

Objectively, Pete isn't wearing that much of Mikey's blood, but after two days, it's smeared everywhere. The side of his neck is tacky where Mikey's wet hand claps at it. 

'Sorry, sorry,' Pete babbles at him. 

'You guys okay?' Joe asks, coming around the van out of the gloom of trees wrapped around them. He's carrying their water-can, which was a gas can once and despite about conservatively three thousand washes still tastes like it every so often, fuming in your nose when you drink. The river water tastes shitty, anyway. 

'Fine,' says Mikey, yanking his face out of Pete's shirt. 'Did you see anything?'

Joe shakes his head. 'I just went for water, man. Andy's the one sneaking around like Rambo.'

'Rambo didn't sneak,' says Pete. Mikey is heavy in his arms. 

'Yeah, well, Andy does, and he's fucking good at it,' says Joe. 'He disappeared like smoke the second I took my eyes off him, squirrelly little bastard.' He says it with the pride he always talks about Andy with, when Andy's not around.

'This is pointless,' says Mikey bitterly. 'They're probably already -'

Pete jerks his head back to look Mikey in the eye, and Mikey at least has the good graces not to finish his sentence. 

God, Pete needs a drink. 

He needs a shower, he needs more than four hours sleep a night, he needs his fucking _meds_ \- he needs his notebook, and he can't apparently have any of those things except maybe, just maybe, the notebook. Mikey pushes his way into the backmost corner of the seat, and Pete can't fucking stay here any longer, clenching his sticky fists. He climbs back out of the van and ducks his shoulder before Joe can catch at him. 'I'm just going for a walk,' he says. 'I need to clear my head.'

'Well that's a fucking shitty idea,' says Joe. 'Did you miss the part where we're hiding in the woods from evil madmen with guns?'

Pete ducks around the van and shoves his head in the front passenger window, scrabbling through the glovebox at full arm's stretch 'til his fingers light on his fucking notebook at last. 'Okay fine, I'm gonna go like literally ten feet from here and sit on a tree stump and try and pretend I'm alone for five minutes, okay? Is that okay?'

Joe sighs at him. 'Whatever, I'm not the boss of you. Don't get yourself fucking killed, okay?'

Pete bumps shoulders with him and ignores the fact that Mikey isn't looking out the back window to watch him walk away. 

It takes him approximately twenty seconds to start calling himself an asshole and a shitty friend and a bullshit artist of the highest order, because what the fuck, Wentz? Walking away from someone who's hurting? Real mature. Real supportive. It isn't like he pushed you away. You just took the first excuse to leave. 

_an asshole_ he scrawls. _but you want to be the boy next door_

He stares at the page. It's not even a good line. Not yet. There's something in it, but he hasn't excavated it yet. He doesn't strike it out, at any rate, but he slams the book shut and stares at his hands instead.

When he climbs back into the van, he doesn't even pretend like he's gonna go sit with Patrick in the front or Joe in the middle seat. Straight into the back he goes, and Mikey curls into him and Pete strokes his back helplessly and thinks _oh god_

It hurts so bad, to see him hurt. So bad Pete runs away from it, and then it hurts to know he's left Mikey alone. And when he peeks up at Pete over the shadow of his own collarbone, and advances a watery smile, Pete can't help smiling back. The positive feedback loop of _god, I fucking love him_.

Of all the times and places to have a fucking revelation. For something that always felt like the fundamental, foundational metaphor on which the entire rest of them were built - love, everywhere and in everything, bringing colour to the world - love, that comes and goes and you chase it forever - love, that you don't deserve - love, the only thing in his heart, the thing his heart is made of - the thing that never wanted him -

Well, this isn't that. This is different. 

''M sorry,' says Mikey, into Pete's shirt. Pete's heart clenches. 

In the front passenger seat, Patrick makes some noise that's almost definitely just one of his almost-asleep noises and not a complaint, or a wordless commentary on where the blame lies in this situation, but Pete flinches anyway.

'Hey, no. I'm fucking sorry,' he whispers back, and presses a very soft kiss to the top of Mikey's head. 'You have every right to be as … morose and moody as you want, okay? Let it all out, Mikeyway. I'm here.'

'I'm just being a fucking bitch,' says Mikey. 'You guys are trying to help.'

He tries to straighten up, but Pete doesn't want him to think he has to hold his own weight all by himself when his limbs are so plainly jelly and his smile still won't come right, so he holds - not tight, but firm. 'Yeah,' he says. 'So lemme help, huh?'

Mikey blinks at him, gently softly warmly sadly, and sags into him, and Pete's heart smooths out.

In the gloom, Pete almost doesn't realise Andy's there until he coughs softly at the window and says, 'Can I come in?'

'Dude, mi casa is literally su casa,' Pete says, reaching over to scrabble at the door handle. Mikey moves with him, easily. Clinging, like a baby possum to Mom. Andy climbs in, looks at his options, and joins Pete and Mikey in the back. Pete's glad. Mikey needs to be warm and Andy's the best for pragmatic provision of body heat. He gives with no strings and no guilt and no weirdness, no quid pro quo ever. 

'So, what did you find?' Pete asks Andy eventually, when they're settled again, and Andy shrugs, scrunching his shoulders up in the lack of space. Mikey's already dozing, judging by the soft breathing against Pete's collarbone. 

'If they didn't have such a good fucking spot to hide in, they'd be fucked.' 

'So, can we -'

Andy sighs. 'What's that line from Lord of the Rings? "Not with ten thousand men could you do this thing"? They're dug in like ticks, man, I can't find a single place where we can get the van in.'

He burrows down into the bedding and sighs. 'We'll think of something, Pete, I promise. It's been like two days, okay, we just need to keep looking, and strategise.'

The night draws in around them, and it's almost laid its veil over the entire van when Andy adds, 'and find some more fucking mushrooms, before we starve.'

Joe, on the other side of the middle seat, snorts. 

Patrick hits him with a pillow. Mikey flinches against Pete’s chest.

***

The next morning, Pete has an idea. He eases himself out from underneath Mikey, leaves him with Andy for a pillow, and slides a box out from under the middle seat that he hasn’t got out since the desert. He stubs his toe on a rock hauling it a little ways from the van, and bites his lip raw rather than let out a yell. 

If they don’t catch him til he’s already done it, he’ll probably get away with it. Even if it is kind of dumb, it’s his kind of dumb.

There’s a crisp sound of leaves behind him. 

'What,' says Mikey a little quizzically, 'are you doing?'

Pete pauses, rope in hand. 'Mostly trying to remember shit from when I was in the Boy Scouts,' he says. 'C'mon, gimme a hand.'

'Bullshit, you were never in the Boy Scouts,' says Mikey, but he clearly sees what Pete's trying to do, because he straightens out the tarp that was folding and catching, and together they manage to string it between three trees, til it origamis into a makeshift tent-fly, slanted away from the van and towards the direction of where the sun will eventually set. The mid-morning light is lemon yellow, splintered into thin neon needles by the forest. 

'Okay. Now tell me why we just did that?'

'Because I'm sick of trying to sleep breathing in Hurley's bean farts,' says Pete. 'I want some fresh air.'

'Pete.'

Pete shrugs. 'I think everyone needs a little space, man. I used to do this sometimes when we were in encampments last year, y'know? Sleep out here, or like. At least look at the stars, instead of the van roof, when I can't sleep.'

'You should sleep more,' says Mikey softly, reflexively. That may be the number two most frequent thing anyone ever says to Pete, though, so he doesn't even dignify it with a response. 

Pete bumps knuckles with him. 'I thought you'd like it?' he says. 'It's peaceful, out in the universe. You can see so many more fucking stars now than you used to.' He peers up at the sky. ‘Or you will, when the sun actually goes down.’

Mikey takes his hand properly, because he's like that - direct. He never pussyfoots around things. 'Okay,' he says, easily. 'You're right, things are kinda cramped in the van.'

‘Nice lovenest,’ says Joe, looming up behind the pair of them. ‘Just you two and the ticks.’

‘Well you’re welcome to join us,’ says Pete. ‘Snuggles, ticks, hypothermia and all.’

‘No thanks, I’ll take Hurley’s bony knees and the warmth. By the way, Patrick said to tell you it’s your turn to go map the fence. He also called you a motherfucker, but he was smiling when he said it, kinda.’

Pete rolls his eyes. ‘Looks like you get to decide if you’d rather have ticks or kicking to keep you company while I’m out, Mikeyway,’ he says. 

Mikey shrugs, a tiny smirk hidden in his otherwise impassive face. ‘Lyme disease or GBH,’ he says. ‘Love my choices.’

Joe snorts. ‘Sooner you go, the sooner you can come back, Wentz,’ he says. ‘Keep your eyes open. We still haven’t spotted where the fuck they’re keeping them. We’re looking for somewhere we could bust through using the van, I think. That was what Hurley was saying last night, anyway.’

Pete didn’t realise they were still having planning meetings without him. 

‘I’ll see what I can find,’ he says. ‘Hey, if I pony up good intel, do I eventually get a seat at the war council table?’

Joe gives him a weird look. ‘You’ve got a seat, dude. You just never sit in it.’

Pete blinks, ‘I - what?’ he asks. ‘No, I - whatever. Whatever. I’ll be back before it gets dark, okay?’ he says to Mikey, who nods. The sun’s already low and the shadows are already dark and deep. Hands thrust into his pockets, he tries hard to walk like Joe does - softly, not leaving scuff marks behind him. 

Tries. Doesn’t exactly succeed. But he’s so engaged in watching where his feet are going that he does at least find mushrooms, and laughs under his breath. He picks them carefully and slides them into his hoodie pockets and hopes he doesn’t crush them later when he inevitably forgets they’re there. When he straightens up there’s a noise, and it wasn’t him, 

He freezes, and realises he’s strayed dangerously close to the actual fence, so close he can see how it’s built. They’ve done a pretty good job. Pete and the others have been checking it for places they could bring in the van - surely, surely there must be somewhere for a vehicle to get in, besides their main entrance, but there just doesn’t seem to be. 

Andy thinks they can’t be that stupid, Pete’s not so sure. One entrance and exit seems safer, more secure. He can understand. 

_It’s a trap_ Patrick pointed out, and Pete thinks he’s right but also like … hindsight is 20/20, y’know. The way this place is just … corralled? Argues there wasn’t a lot of design involved. The buildings look like the outhouses and sheds and barns of a farm, weathered like they’ve been here forever. Pete’s pretty sure these fuckwits just fenced it in out of paranoia and territoriality.

They didn’t do such a great job, either, Pete thinks, alight with his own paranoia but not scared enough to not be bitchy. He still isn’t sure where the noise came from, so he’s still frozen, and all there really is to look at is the fence. 

And the gaps in it, he realises when he catches a flicker. He can see through it in places. He can see _people_. The noise crackles again - it’s someone snapping sticks. Kindling, he figures - they’re walking around picking the sticks up, breaking them to length, corralling them in one arm.

Another person. A woman this time, tossing something on the ground - chicken feed. For the chickens he realises he can see now, little brown-orange flashes of speed between palings. 

And then a third person, closer. Pete flinches away from the fence, but it doesn’t seem to matter - they’re carrying a tray of something, and going into a ...shed? A shack. Almost a lean-to. The back of it is close to the fence.

The faintest smell of … onions? Suffuses the air. 

The person, the tray, ducks into the shack, and Pete watches the tableau from outside the fence - through the fence. 

_This_ he thinks. _This is how we do it, this is how we get in. Fuck the van, they’re right there -_

It’s so hard to fight the impulse to claw through the fence, particularly when someone in the shack clatters.

‘Fuck off!’ says Ray, unmistakeably Ray, and Pete’s limbs move without his say so. They’re so fucking _close_ \- 

The girl - Pete can see that she’s a girl when she comes out, her face is turned towards him and he can see the arch of her cheekbones, the tousle of her hair under her hat, for a split second before she turns back away and heads towards the bigger buildings - doesn’t see him when she comes out, but he’s frozen anyway. 

He could do it now. He could force his way through this fence. 

His hand itches on the rough wood - but he turns away. 

He shouldn’t be in the driver’s seat. He needs the war council. 

***

‘Keep it down,’ Joe hisses at Pete. ‘Mikey’ll hear you.’

‘We can do it, Trohman. I’m telling you, they’re like. Ten feet from the fence. We don’t need the fucking van.’

‘He said Gerard can’t walk, Pete.’

‘So we’ll carry him, Christ. I’ll fucking carry him, like the princess he is, Joe, I don’t even care. They’re so close, man, hanging back like this is fucking stupid.’

‘Dude, calm down. I get it, okay, I do, but if we fuck this up then we really will never get a second chance. You gotta let us figure out the right way to do it.’

Pete fumes and swears but just like he’s right, Joe’s right too. 

‘Okay,’ he says. ‘Fuck you and your logic, but okay.’

Joe catches him before he can stomp off, and bro-hugs him. ‘You did good, Wentz,’ he says. ‘We’re gonna get them out. But we can’t go off half-cocked.’

Pete snorts involuntarily. ‘Phrasing, Trohman.’

‘Yeah yeah. Look, leave it with me. I’ll talk to Patrick and Hurley, we’ll figure something out, okay? Go get some fucking sleep.’

He pushes Pete away, solicitously. Pete goes, because Mikey’s been alone all afternoon and he doesn’t like that at all. Their little tent is hardly more than three or four steps away from the van, but it’s very quiet, when he hunkers down and peers at Mikey. 

Mikey looks like an owl in the growing gloom.

‘Hey,’ Pete says, because if either of them says _are you okay?_ one more time Pete will genuinely scream.

‘Hey,’ Mikey says back. ‘You know there’s no privacy out here, right, and I have ears.’

‘Shit,’ says Pete. ‘Mikeyway, I’m sorry -‘

Mikey shrugs, sits himself up and hugs his knees. ‘Joe’s right.’

Pete hates how defeated he sounds, but he’s not going to argue. It’s not his place. If Mikey’s coping by resigning himself to the worst, who’s Pete to criticise? Pete’s not exactly been dealing well with having the rug yanked out from under him either, and he hasn’t even got a half of Mikey’s excuses.

Instead he sits down, curls his knees up under himself, and together they look out at the dying light. Mikey’s hand finds his, eventually. 

Slowly, slowly, they slump together. Pete unfolds himself. His legs were going dead, and now the feeling floods back, hot and stinging. He kicks his shoes off, arches his back up off the ground so he can thread the belt out of his pants. Sleeping in your jeans sucks, but there are at least ways to improve the situation. 

Mikey’s rustling under blankets beside him, and when Pete finishes settling himself, he throws the blankets over Pete too. They settle into a musty-smelling warmth, and an enduring silence. Pete’s never so quiet with anyone as he is with Mikey, never. His body’s glad he moved, and it makes it clear to him with sharpness. The numbness is all gone and now the pain’s flowing away too, leaving him with a glass-clear awareness of the delimitation of his body against the ground and the bedding and Mikey. 

Mikey took his jeans off. He’s hot against Pete’s skin, at first, but it ebbs like a tide as they watch the sky. 

It's hard to tell if the sun's really set until the temperature drops. The light goes away first, til they're breathing in the dark, staring at the trees, and then the coldness comes and Mikey shivers.

He’s lying on his back, and they’re only touching by virtue of the fact that there’s no other space in here. It’s not much. It’s not enough to keep him warm.

Pete thinks he made a mistake bringing them out here, a mistake letting Mikey know he’d found anything beyond the fence, until Mikey turns into him, close close close, and their mouths bump softly together in the gloom. Mikey's eyes shiver shut, and Pete kisses him because he can't not. Mikey’s mouth is slack and warm even though he’s trembling. 

Pete only kisses him for a moment, just a moment - a split second whim, the kind of dumb hunger he’s always been so fucking shitty at resisting - then pulls away. Mikey doesn’t chase him, although they don’t pull apart. It’s too fucking cold for that. Pete kicks himself a little. Is this how Mikey felt? Wanting something physical and having Pete drop the ball every time? Every time Mikey pressed them together and Pete wanted-him-but-not-that - every time Mikey set them up and Pete fumbled the pass, is this how Mikey felt? 

They’ve always been out of time with each other, out of phase, but … here's the thing about missing a beat. If you wait, it'll come round again. If you know what you did wrong, you can always step back in.

Mikey snuggles his face, his pointy nose, his delicate, shivering eyelashes, into the crook of Pete’s neck. Pete’s breath catches from the cold. He can see it materialise in the air in front of him. Maybe staying out here was a mistake. Maybe it’s too early in the season still. At least the flatulence-laden van is warm. 

Then Mikey kisses the hollow of his throat. 

He’s so fucking brave. 

Pete ... hurts a little thinking that maybe it’s his fault, maybe the reasons why Mikey needs time, to pull up the courage to kiss him, are due to him. 

_it doesn’t have to hurt, Pete_

Mikey breathes against his larynx, presses delicate kisses there in between breaths like he wants to avoid looking Pete in the eye as long as he can, and Pete cradles him close and looks out the opening of the tarp at the lava cracks of the sky between the topmost spindles of the trees. 

The sky has never been so huge and cloudless and full of stars, and it'd almost be pretty except the whole world is dusted over and dead, and Pete just can’t forget that even if he stares at the sky and never blinks or looks down again. 

The sky is full of stars, and here's Pete, kind of hesitating on the edge of something, in the starlight and up above them there's the half-slice of the moon and Mikey unsnuffles himself from Pete’s skin and crawls up enough to look at him, just to arch one eyebrow at him.

And Pete's breath really does vanish. ‘I -‘ he starts, and then kinda loses whatever he meant to say. 

‘I know,’ say Mikey. Which is more than Pete does. 

Mikey touches his throat where he left a wet hot mark, and Pete ducks his head to kiss him again and again, this time neither of them resisting it. Because what else is there to do? Come morning, all the stars will be gone. Come morning, they’re going to have to talk about whether or not the temptation of the hole in the fence is enough to draw them through to try something fucking, fucking stupid and entirely needed. 

‘You want something, Pete?’ Mikey asks him, and Pete, because he can never help twisting the knife in his own wounds, shakes his head. 

‘Want you,’ he says into the corner of Mikey’s chapped mouth. ‘Just want to kiss you.’

Mikey smiles at him, and Pete’s lizard brain goes warm and happy. ‘I - yeah,’ Mikey says. ‘Me too. Like we used to, yeah?’

Pete’s human, oh-so-human heart clenches, against the memories of sunshine and sunscreen and cheap beer, and kisses, because yeah. Like they used to.

Pete can never, ever admit it, but Mikey's the last touchstone of that time before when he could be stupid and careless with no real consequences. When summer heat was something you knew was only fleeting. Now, out here in the van days after the cataclysm, when it’s in the sky the sun is permanently scorching, when it’s not the earth freezes solid. Consequences are everywhere, and everyone's lips are permanently cracked.

Pete likes that, in a weird self destructive way, because he hates it. 

He wants to erode away, that's all he's ever wanted. He dumps out his soul into his notebooks and gives it away in pieces, scrubs it out with marker pens and feeds it into the maw of Patrick's process. Or he used to, before summer kisses found their way back to him. 

Once upon a time Pete, you used to take action. Once upon a time, you used to drive. 

Once upon a time, you used to kiss without being afraid it meant you had to fuck. Once upon a time, you knew you didn’t have to do anything you didn’t want to. 

Once upon a time there were no necessities. There was just the right thing in the moment. 

Mikey’s body under Pete’s palms feels fence-rickety. 

The right thing to do opens up in Pete’s mind like a night-blooming flower, and it isn’t fucking. 

***

Patrick, the night-owl, finds him lying under the van with a flashlight clenched between his teeth, staring at his notebook. Wasting batteries, because he came out here thinking he could finally fucking write, and he _still can’t._

‘It’s not Mikey,’ says Patrick, after regarding Pete for a long moment that Pete’s been pretending isn’t happening. ‘You know it’s not, so stop thinking it.’

Pete … guesses he should know that, or does know that, but he shrugs helplessly. This is what he has Patrick for - spitting his own truths back at him once they're processed. Patrick’s always been Pete’s remote server.

‘I guess it'll all come out when this is over,’ he says wryly. ‘Hindsight is 20/20, right?’

Patrick kind of nudges his shoulder with a foot. Or kicks him. Whatever. 'It's never over,' he says. 'It's never been over, Pete. You just. You always seem to check out of every situation sooner or later, and then I get this,' and he pokes his foot at the little book Pete’s holding. 

That Polaroid flutters out of it onto the cold ground. Pete picks it up and shoves it back between the pages without looking at it properly.

'Don't check out on him,' says Patrick softly. 'Not that I think you're going to, but. the words are always there, Pete, and there's more to you than the shit you're able to write down, so. This isn't going anywhere. I'm not - we're not going anywhere.'

They came to get him, Pete thinks. 

They didn't have to, they were in the Damned Things tour van and it was only fucking coincidence Patrick had gone to see them play that night. The three of them didn't have to drive all the way to LA to find him, through fucking fire and storms and everything, but they did.

And he never really came along with them, not all of the way. Not til now.

Pete's boltcutters, that worked so good on every other fence when they started their crusade, are still in the back of the van.

He reaches up, book in hand, and proffers it to Patrick. 'Look after it for me?' he says. ‘I’ve got something I need to do.'


End file.
